Manufacturing processes are highly automated and may be divided into several hierarchical layers. For example, at the highest level, the enterprise resource planning (ERP) takes place, which may be referred to as a business layer. At lower levels, the hardware implementation and control take place, which may be referred to as various control or unit layer. An intermediate layer integrates and connects business and control layers. This intermediate layer includes a manufacturing execution system (MES) that defines an MES process in terms of data and interactions between functions, such as resource management, resource allocation, dispatching, data collection and acquisition, quality assurance management, maintenance management, performance analysis, scheduling, document control, labor management and material and production tracking.
The interaction between humans and machines during the manufacturing process is done through interfaces referred to as Human Machine Interfaces (HMIs). The HMI is the single entry point to the machine world for machine operators; it provides humans the status information about the machines such as position, velocity, temperature, etc. Using this information, the human provides commands to the machines to modify their behavior; for example, for them to stop, to move, to mill, to drill, etc.
HMI technology is human-centric, built for humans to understand machines. Thus, HMI typically focuses on techniques receiving information from machines and presenting in a manner that allows a human to quickly review and respond accordingly. However, aside from this presentation, the automation system largely ignores the important roles of humans in the automation environment. This exposes a deficiency in the system because the safety, quality and efficiency overall automation system is highly dependent on how humans interact it.
A major problem in machine-human communication is that there is no interface that machines can used to access humans. Machines communicate with one another via application programming interfaces (APIs). Each API provides a list of set of methods, protocols, and tools for a interacting with a machine. For example, an API for a conveyor belt may allow a machine to provide commands for starting and stopping the belt, querying for status information, etc. However, to date, there are no APIs offered for interacting with humans in the automation environment. Thus, machines must rely on direct input of information (e.g., via the MES, a HMI) to get information about the humans working with the machines. This introduces inefficiency in the automation system because information input is primarily a manual process. Moreover, it limits the flexibility of the overall automation environment because machines lack the knowledge of how to best interact with humans.
In the future smart factory where machines are intelligent and autonomous, there will also be humans cooperating with machines to achieve unprecedented levels of efficiency and creativity. Humans will play a more important role than today because they will be the critical decision makers. Humans will be participating and collaborating with machines at a higher level than what it is today—e.g., supervising machines; making decisions that machines cannot make; interchanging tasks with machines; optimizing production by involving the analytics contributed by machines, etc. However, such collaboration between humans and machines will be hindered if a machine-to-human interface and concept are not clearly defined and humans are not modeled digitally. Thus, beyond just communication, there is also a need for digitally modelling the human as another machine which performs work in the factory.
Accordingly, it is desired to provide a Human Programming Interface (HPI) that machines can use to access the available data generated by humans to integrate humans into the automation environment in a manner that enhances machine-to-human communications beyond the capabilities currently available in automation technology. It is further desired to build upon such an interface to provide complete digital modeling of the human for use in optimizing factory activities.